Many Voices

Spent today at the annual Rose Bruford symposium: Many Voices. It's a terrific thing for a drama school to do - the initiative of the fabulous Nesta Jones. She seems staggeringly well-connected: all sorts of fascinating people turn up. In the morning, I do a workshop on Devising the Intercultural Play. There are about 35 students involved - so I'm not able to go into much detail with any of them, but we do some intriguing exercises around structure and creativity, and end up making short plays about the experience of culture clash. The group is multicultural enough for this to be effective: there's a fun piece about an Hugarian trying to order coffee, an extraordinary scene with a Japanese performer showing us all where Butoh came from, and a wonderful scene of two people watching a show which only one of them understands (and which is clearly a comedy).

Haili joins me for the afternoon session, and Jayne Richards interviews us both about Dis-Orientations. Good to continue talking about the piece, and letting new ideas flow. Haili tells me she's spoken to Zhang Ruihong, who has now read the script in its Chinese version. She has no concerns about it, so long as she isn't called upon to do "anything physical", which she won't be. She also thinks we may find it hard to get past the censor for Chinese performance, mainly because of the Mme. Mao scenes. I'll keep waiting.